Dried Lakes Do Tell Tales: Seismic Soil Amplification in Mexico City

Autorecovery and everyday disaster in Mexico City’s peripheries

“…Indeed, Mexico City is a high-risk, high inequity city, and its disaster risk and urbanization processes are tied up in zones of conflict (see Gago, 2015) due to extraction from peripheries that resource the urban center. Despite the current government’s insistence that México has entered a ‘post-neoliberal’ period (Ackerman et al., 2021; Animal Político, 2019), this extraction is a privatized process that produces scarcity and dangerous land subsidence 9 that exacerbates climate and geological hazards (Nikolaou et al., 2019; Vitz, 2018). However, peripheries by virtue of their existence do unsettle these and other ‘official’ logics—including processes of market capitalism—through mundane, everyday practice.…”

“…Some estimates place the death toll at over 35,000 people (USGS, n.d.), although unregulated or irregular physical and economic structures make it hard to know the real numbers for certain. While the more affluent areas of the city located in the alcaldías of Benito Juárez and Cuauhtémoc (which include the upper- and middle-class colonias of la Roma, la Condesa, and Narvarte) experienced heavy damage due to magnified shaking and a dangerous below-ground soil transition zone (Nikolaou et al., 2019), low-income areas and public buildings (e.g., social housing, government offices) were the hardest hit there (Villarreal and Bielma, 2012). These low-income areas consisted of overcrowded rent-controlled tenements in the central areas that had fallen into disrepair before the earthquake, as well as irregularly autoconstructed homes at the edges of the city.…”

“…More than half of Mexico City’s residents live in areas that are or were once irregularly urbanized settlements, but those living in the soft-soil regions of the dried Texcoco lakebed—Xochimilco, Iztapalapa, Tláhuac—experience a distinct combination of state neglect and ‘everyday disaster’ that includes flooding, mudslides, and belowground infrastructural damage that remains poorly- or non-functional due to significant soil subsidence and disinvestment in reconstruction after major earthquakes. The muddy, porous soil in these areas makes earthquakes particularly dangerous to the high concentration of settlements there (Nikolaou et al., 2019)—a hazard condition only exacerbated by capitalist extraction and the privatization of the water system, which continues to drain the Texcoco lakebed catchment amid ongoing disaster recovery and simultaneous peripheral urbanization processes. Further, exponential population growth and urbanization have simultaneously produced risk alongside efforts to reduce it.…”